Now that summertime is here we have much more time to spend on our Family Home Evenings. Besides having all day, you don’t have to worry about homework and an early bedtime for school the next day. Start planning now for an all day Family Home Evening event at your house. Use this time to rekindle some of those lost hours and rushed moments. And enjoy your children in a relaxed, fun, and memorable setting.

In the morning, set your table with your best table settings. Make it look special and beautiful. Add a centerpiece, but make sure it doesn’t block anyone’s line of sight. The children are going to ask “what’s up?” and “why are you doing this?” but you are going to keep silent. The mystery dinner has begun.

Sometime in the afternoon, do either one of the following:

1. Ask the children to go down into your storage room and find something they would like to prepare and contribute to the family dinner. It might be a canned item, a handful of chocolate chips, something from the freezer, even from the garden-if you have something ripened and ready. Let them explore and think about it. BUT, they must keep it a secret from one another. Make sure they are able to prepare it on their own.
2. Drive them to the store, hand them each a few dollar bills, and give them ten minutes to find something for the family dinner. Again, they must keep it a secret from one another and be able to make it table ready on their own.

At the appointed time, everyone gather at the table and see what each has supplied to the family meal. You may end up with plenty of dessert and not enough dinner, or all dip and no chips. Whatever happens, enjoy the meal and one another.

Because evenings are longer in the summer, after dinner you will still have plenty of time to take a drive together, or go outside and walk around. But again, you have planned something for this moment.

In a lunch sack, prepare slips of paper with simple directions written on them: turn left and go 2 blocks, take the next exit and turn right, at the next red light everyone get out and run around the car (that could be a little too embarrassing, but remind your children that teenagers used to do that for fun—all on their own—no parents forcing them). During your excursion, pull out these slips at random moments and see where you end up.

When you return home, you will have one final activity planned and ready. You can use the following suggestions, or come up with some of your own, but the idea is to finish the evening off with a variety of questions and answers from the scriptures:

1. Give hints about a certain scriptural person and have your children guess who.
2. Ask a specific question and wait for someone to guess the right answer.
3. Ask for a list, i.e., list the ten commandments, list what animals were used for sacrifices, list in order events of Jesus’ last week, list all of what Lehi saw in his dream and/or give Nephi’s interpretation, etc.
4. Sing the Articles of Faith songs from the Primary Songbook and spend time discussing them.
5. Have a scripture mastery race where the leader begins reading the verse and everyone else rushes to find it and reads along.

You might also like to have a box or basket nearby. For every right answer, the person, or team, can make a basket for extra points—if you feel like making it a friendly competition, that is.

Life gets so busy. We often just fall into a rut and don’t stop to really enjoy one another. Hopefully, your next Monday evening will be full of love and laughter.